V-locity® Benefits

Easily deploy to the largest virtual,
physical or cloud environments in
just five clicks

Before-and-after performance reporting
to validate performance gains

Enterprise-wide visibility into I/O
performance, from server to storage

"With V-locity, our SQL batch
imports can run during the
night so data is ready for
production in the morning.
Before V-locity, batch jobs
would take so long, we would
lose a full day of production
and sometimes two."

RALPH ORTIZ
IT MANAGER
ASL MARKETING

Environment

VMware vSphere 5.1

42 Windows servers running SQL Server

EMC VNXe SAN with 15K and 10K SAS

10GbE network

V-locity Features

IntelliWrite® I/O optimization
technology automatically prevents split
I/Os from being generated when a file is
typically broken into pieces before write.

When ASL marketing would regularly import 150 million
updated records into its SQL database, the job would take
27 hours to complete, resulting in lost time and money
since account managers were not able to access the most
current data immediately.

The Customer

As the leading source for direct marketing youth data, ASL Marketing
connects your brand to consumers with extensive and unparalleled industry
expertise in data content, aggregation and analytics of the youth, young
adult and student demographics.

The Challenge

ASL Marketing’s business is database marketing with millions of records
under management that advertising agencies and vendors alike put to use.
This database is constantly being appended to and updated to reflect the
most current behavioral and demographic data, which is an absolute must for
their clients who need immediate access to the most current data at all times.

Records were ballooning to the point that the monthly import to the master
database exceeded 150 million records and took 27 hours to run the batch
job across their SQL servers. Other databases like their college record
database needed to be updated once a week and would take 17 hours to
complete. As a result, access to the most current data was being delayed by
a full day and sometimes two.

With data under management exploding, the IT staff was managing to a
flat budget and needed to find ways to improve performance without buying
expensive new hardware.

"Typically, IT professionals respond to application performance issues by
reactively buying more hardware. Without the luxury of a padded budget, we
needed to find a way to improve performance on the hardware infrastructure
we already have," said Ralph Ortiz, IT Manager, ASL Marketing.

The Solution

Ralph heard about V-locity® I/O reduction and caching software and reached
out to the Condusiv sales team to help him with an evaluation to see how
V-locity would perform in his real-world environment of SQL servers.

"I was very doubtful that V-locity could improve my I/O performance through
a software-only solution. But with nothing to lose, we evaluated V-locity on
our SQL servers and were amazed to see that, literally overnight, we doubled
performance and cut our SQL batch job times in half," said Ortiz.

Installed on Windows VMs at the operating system layer, V-locity I/O
reduction and caching software nondisruptively optimizes I/O at the
source—reducing the I/O requirement for all files which accelerates both
reads and writes. By preventing a surplus of I/O from getting funneled
through servers, network, and storage, the entire infrastructure derives
benefit because only productive I/O is generated by the VM.

With IntelliWrite® technology, V-locity sequentializes otherwise random I/O
created by the “I/O blender effect” of multiple VMs funneling I/O streams
down to the hypervisor. By reorganizing this random pattern to behave
sequentially as a single, contiguous I/O, less I/O is required for any given file.
Since more data is now processed with each I/O operation, organizations
achieve greater throughput and improved response times. Subsequent reads
also benefit, since only minimum I/O is required to fulfill the data request.

With IntelliMemory,® V-locity caches active data in available server memory
to further reduce I/O demand on storage devices.

The Result

After deploying V-locity, SQL batch jobs that used to take 27 hours to
complete now take 12–14 hours to complete. The weekly college database
import that used to take 17 hours to complete is now down to 7 hours.

“With V-locity, our SQL batch imports can run during the night so data is ready
for production in the morning. Before V-locity, batch jobs would take so long,
we would lose a full day of production and sometimes two,” said Ortiz.

According to Ortiz, the most important value V-locity provided is that they
didn’t have to buy new, expensive hardware to double their SQL performance.

“We moved to 10GbE to improve throughput but still had limitations. V-locity
saved us from having to make a heavy investment in SSDs or do a complete
rip and replace of our entire hardware infrastructure. To this day, I still can’t
believe software is doing this,” said Ortiz.

How can we help?

Business Users
Want to talk to a live sales representative?
CALL 800.829.6468